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VI Premio Graziadei – Menzione speciale → Giorgio Di Noto: The Offing

About This Project

The Offing explores the contrast between ethics and aesthetics that arises when we are faced with pleasant images withholding an underlying backstory. The group of pictures, which comes from some online temporary archives managed by terrorist cells, are not explicitly linked to the notion of war, and focus instead on a non-violent vision that often evokes different photographic approaches and clichès. By showing something which is aesthetically familiar and pleasing, and then revealing it was made by a terrorist, a conflict of perception is created. The images have been reproduced by placing a 4×5” film sheet on the monitor screen and using its light to impress the film. The impossibility of the film to come into direct contact with the image, because of the LCD thickness, creates a slight blur and expresses the concept of distance: the distance between what the images represent for us and what they actually illustrate, between us and the images we see on a screen. The action of bringing them back to materiality fixes in time and space something that is temporarily sailing in the ether. ​ The Offing aims to investigate the preconceptions that guide our gaze of the photographic image and the use of the language used by terrorists to spread their propaganda. How do we relate to the vision of something that is at the same time so far and so close, so apparently fictional and so real? How our perception changes when we find out these pictures are made by terrorists?